


Appetence

by ancestrallizard



Category: Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga
Genre: Blood and Gore, Disembowelment, M/M, doesn't happen to any of the mains but its still a thing that happens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-20
Updated: 2019-02-20
Packaged: 2019-11-01 03:19:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17859263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancestrallizard/pseuds/ancestrallizard
Summary: Heat learns one of the downsides of being able to become an uninhibited murder-monster.





	Appetence

**Author's Note:**

> This was mostly written as practice so i could get back in the groove of concentrating on writing one piece at a time and focusing on it for an hour plus per session instead of switching between three projects like i usually do (though i was still working on another when i wrote this anyway). It is nothing new and is not stretching my skills in any way except work ethic, but i kind of enjoy the final product so maybe you will too?

Serph was the first to hear them. 

He signaled Heat and Argilla and they both froze, waiting and listening.

Heat was never the best at locating hidden enemies, but even he detected bodies lurking just out of sight behind hills of rubble and scrap metal.

An ambush, but a sloppy one, the enemy likely still unfamiliar with the ways their new bodies scraped again objects.

He smirked. About time someone bothered to stop them. He was almost getting bored.

Serph’s form twisted and distorted into Varna’s. That was the only order he needed. Heat allowed himself to change, distantly aware of Argilla following suit. He felt his consciousness distort and dim, the soldier retreating as the monster took the fore.

They weren’t separate beings from the monsters they could become, not really. They were always them. But something in the breaking of bones and rewiring of synapses _changed_ them, either grafting something new onto their brains or unearthing something that’d always been buried in them, something brutal and selfish and hungry.

For Heat, it was a relief. Agni is him, but without inhibitions, and without nearly as much concern about things like loyalty or obedience. His feelings toward their leader, which were becoming more contentious the longer he had emotion, were mercifully streamlined. He liked to kill. Serph led them to things he could kill. Therefore Serph was good.

He took a deep breath with two sets of olfactory senses, and now he could smell the enemy as well. Close by, very close.

Varna moved in, and they attacked.

They were a mess, barely a cohesive, but the enemy wasn’t any better. There were six of them, wearing their own twisted monstrous forms, and they scattered immediately upon being discovered. They moved erratically, almost trampling over each other in their haste to reach them. Hunger, then. It was a wonder they hadn’t turned on each other already. 

There was something about their new forms, beyond the incessant hunger, that corroded the detached practicality of the old ways. Where once they would have picked each other off with calculated gunfire from a distance, now there was a mutual rush to tear with claws and teeth and taste flesh, strategy be damned.

Some, like Argilla, struggled against the impulses, and against Prithivi, futilely. Others, like Serph, struck a careful balance, channeling the power and fury of Varna into cold focus without ever relinquishing control. 

Heat seceded almost completely to Agni whenever the opportunity arose, letting him hunt as he wished. He understood himself, what motivated him, what he wanted, and he wouldn’t be caught off guard. 

Hunting as Agni was dangerous. It was uncoordinated. It was brutal. 

It was fast becoming his favorite thing in the world. 

Three of the enemy beelined straight for Agni. The fasted of them leaps at him, and he lowered his shoulder and checks it in midair, slamming it down with an audible snap. The enemy cried out, snapping and lashing out with forelimbs while its lower body lay useless.

Agni drew back clawed fists and brought them crashing down on its head, obliterating it and sending a spray of brain and viscera across his forearms.

(It was a waste of meat, but the finality and the mist of life that caught on his tongues was worth it, so worth it. How could anyone ever go back to rations after this?).

The second went the way of the first, trying to physically engage him and being rebuffed and restrained by Agni’s superior physical stature. His left head gripped the enemy’s throat and he bit down, hard enough to paralyze it and then biting harder, through sinew and bone and severing the windpipe like it was wet paper. Blood flowed down his throats in a torrent. If he could have laughed in elation he would have.

Instead of lingering over either kill he rushes to the third enemy combatant, circling and wary after the quick deaths of its comrades. 

Agni reached out, but before he could wring its neck it dodged, circling and scrambling up his back with a razor grip. 

Teeth closed around his nape and a set of claws slashed across the side of his right head in a semicircle, from the corner of his mouth to the back of his skull. It was so sharp he barely felt it, and only when the pain exploded and skin and hot liquid fall over his lower jaw did that he realize that his face had been sliced open. 

Agni bellowed. He twisted to pull the enemy away, but it was gone in an instant. A familiar scent flooded his noses and pierced the haze of bloodlust. 

Varna. His leader held the enemy in one hand and with a casual movement decapitated it with the other. The body spasmed once, then went still. 

Agni snarled, outrage overriding the pleasure of the hunt as he searched for a target for his frustration.

They were almost all dead, bodies lying in various states of completeness, with the very last one struggling in Prithivi’s whip.

Agni rushed in, biting it and tearing it loose before the other Embryon member could finish it off herself. She wouldn’t have appreciated it anyway.

It thrashed weakly, obviously wounded. He could have just crushed it, almost did so, but instead he gripped it by the throat and dipped his head, sinking his fangs into its midsection as deeply through fur and blood and bone as they could go.

He wrenched his head. A chunk of its side ripped away completely as it choked on a mangled scream. He bit and tore again, the motion splattering his head and front with gore so hot he almost felt it through his thick hide. He pulled apart a lung entirely, exposing unraveled steaming innards and a quivering organ that might have been a heart. 

He let it fall to the ground. It would die. Eventually.

He heard Varna’s frame melt away, heard the smaller, lighter footsteps that meant Serph was Serph again.

The demon under his claws twitched in its death throes, dark fluids soaking the ground. It was warm. His mouths watered.

Agni tore a limb away with a few determined twists of his uninjured jaw, barely aware of the enemy’s last gasped breath. Instead of eating it, he carried it, carefully, like it was a piece of valuable equipment, and placed it at Serph’s feet. 

They would all eat eventually, consuming enough to satiate but not slow them, cutting pieces away to replace their rations and then caching the rest for other Embryon members to collect later.

But it was important to Agni, to Heat, that Serph have a piece first, that he sees them bring it to him.

(Why? Was it to show Serph he didn’t need him? That he could take care of himself? Yes, that had to be it).

Serph didn’t verbally respond, but his presence moved closer. Cold fingers barely hovered over his injured jaw. Serph’s scent was almost entirely obscured by blood. Before he could make contact, Agni’s hand flew up and caught Serph’s arm in an iron grip. His jaw opened, and Heat almost shifted back immediately, because as infuriating as he found Serph he didn’t want to deals with the ensuing trouble with the rest of the Embryon if he bit their leader’s hand off.

But Agni did not bite him, didn’t even growl as a warning for approaching his wounds. Instead he licked their leader’s arm, mid-forearm to palm, slowly, careful not to use his teeth for once. Heat was too surprised by the action to do anything about it. The blood on Serph wasn’t his own. As far as he could tell he was unharmed. Agni relaxed, and Serph’s hand finally traced his injury, magic slowly knitting the torn flesh together.

Heat felt something new stirring in his brain. It was like a facsimile of hunger, just as innate, but instead of orienting around food and survival it had to do with the person before him. In a strange inversion, rather than satiating itself the want (For attention? For contact? For _what?_ ) only worsened the longer he stayed close to Serph. He felt drawn and repulsed all at once, wanted to be closer as much as he wanted to shy away, and it filled him with nervous energy, like the energy that led him to kill but there wasn’t anything to kill, not anymore, so why did he feel like this?

Some part of him knew in the back of his mind what this was, or thought it knew, that there were words, songs, books about what was happening here, but he couldn’t put a name to it, didn’t know if he wanted to (would putting a name to it make it easier to kill?).

He retreated, form reverting to humanity. Serph was still touching his newly healed face. Heat was still holding his arm.

Serph’s colorless eyes traced the newly healed skin as he moved closer (why was he doing that why did he still feel like this?).

He traced it with his thumb, and Heat backed away, bristling as if he’d been threatened. 

“Why are you just standing there?” He snapped. “Help me bury these.”

He ate, cleaned and cached what’s left of the enemy alongside his fellow tribe members, pointedly ignoring both of them all the while.

He needed to keep tighter control on his new power in the future. Strength was not worth the – irrationalities – that evaded control and made in act in ways he didn’t understand, made him want to lash out at someone, anyone, to make it stop.

He buried the last of the enemies, and finally began to knows fear.

**Author's Note:**

> and the downside was non-rage Emotions
> 
> my memorys so bad im pretty sure ive used all this imagery before already
> 
> argilla pretty much disappears after the midpoint i deeply apologize. shes still there, wishing she was home w jinanna 
> 
>  
> 
> ancestrallizard.tumblr.com
> 
> https://twitter.com/DVLblues


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